A/N: I was playing Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean one day and I was leveling up my characters, which in some RPG games (like Tales of Symphonia and Baten Kaitos) means that you have to go into a room, then leave and enter again to get the enemies to respawn. While doing such a thing, I thought, well how would I like it if every time the hero came in and killed me, that I respawned and then got killed...over and over and over again just so the stupid creep could be a higher level...then I got to thinking about conversations that would go on between enemies while the hero wasn't in the room. And so here is the result.

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Shawn, the redead knight, felt his cold heart stop beating. His eye-less sockets closed as the Hero stabbed him fatally, ridding Shawn of his last hit points. His sword fell from his grasp, clanking onto the stone floor that made up the tower room and he felt his knees give out, the soul lights which hovered above his shoulders going out, his nose banging harshly as he dropped face down onto the floor.

He didn't know how long he floated in Limbo, but the black darkness around him was overwhelming. In between life and death, never truly becoming a part of either one, Shawn waiting, nearly suffocating.

And yet, it seemed moments later that his feet met with the ground and he was walking around the open tower room under an impulse not his own.

Shawn shivered at his return, dragging his broken leg with the shin bone sticking out behind him as he shuffled along.

"You never get used to it."

Neck popping as he looked over his shoulder, Shawn tried to locate the source of the voice, only to find that it came from somewhere near his feet. Squinting, he barely made out Riko, one of the many ice-toads on this floor of the tower.

"Excuse me?" Shawn asked politely.

"Spawning. You never get used to it." Riko croaked.

"Hey is the New Kid back yet? Hey! New Kid!" A chimera shook out its blackened lion's mane, fire spewing out of its mouth with each word spoken. The serpentine tail hissed angrily as the chimera whacked it into the wall.

"My name is Shawn." He tried to keep his voice free of long-suffering. The chimera still insisted on calling him 'New Kid' since the game creators had added him in as one of the final touches.

His path luckily took him away from the chimera as it shouted something else at him. The chimera was forced to sit in a corner and guard an item even though the Hero had taken it already.

Riko, who was one of the free-moving enemies allowed to hop around the room with no restrictions, followed Shawn to the opposite side of the tower floor.

"How are the kids Martha?" Riko bounced up to one of the other ice-toads. Female, though nothing about her anatomy would have given that away.

Martha sighed, "They're alright I think. I haven't seen them since the Hero showed up..."

The rest of her words were lost as Shawn was forced to turn around back to the other side of the room.

His range of vision was so utterly near-sighted that Shawn carefully shuffled his way along, just barely able to see the next step in front of him. Beyond that, it was rather cloudy, but he didn't mind. He had been told by the others that he was one of the stronger enemies of the room, second to the chimera because of its strength in magic which often the Hero lacked a defense to, and thus the short-sightedness was a result. He wasn't allowed to attack the Hero unless said Hero strayed close. Mostly because he simply couldn't see the Hero until it was too late.

"Oh no. Not again." One of the ice-toads groaned, "Get ready, here he comes!"

Shawn glanced about, but couldn't make anything out. He wandered about, or so he liked to think since he was really sticking to one basic path, able to hear the horrendous death cries of the ice-toads, squalling as the Hero once again splattered their slick, watery little bodies but unable to see them. For that he was grateful for the lack of vision.

Shawn turned around to head back the other way and caught sight of the Hero. Deep within his body, something snapped and he ran full throttle, faster than anything with a broken leg should be able, headlong for the Hero and engaged the Hero in battle...

The result was inevitable and once more Shawn fell to the ground, floated in Limbo for a while, and then reappeared, back to walking his way as usual.

"Watch where you're goin' yah fool!"

"Oh I'm sorry." Shawn responded automatically, frantically looking every which way in an attempt to see what the matter was.

He finally spied an ice-toad at his feet, directly in his path. He tried to move forward, but the stupid thing was right in the way, so he stopped.

"Um, could you move please?"

"What for?" The ice-toad croaked rudely.

"Well you see, um, you can move about rather freely I think. And I'm stuck to the same path, see? So if you wouldn't mind..."

"As a matter of fact, I do mind. This is a good spot, I can see all of the room from here."

Shawn fell silent, envying the ice-toad for a moment. "What's it look like?"

The ice-toad glared suspiciously up at Shawn, "What's what look like?"

"The room? I can't see it very well so I was just wondering..."

"If I would tell you? I think not." The ice-toad hopped to one of his friends, leaving Shawn by himself again.

"Stupid blighter." Riko mumbled as he hopped up, "Don't let his kind be bothering you, Shawn. He's just angry because he was made into an ice-toad and not a chimera or zombie knight. Though I don't know why he's jealous of the chimera, poor guy has to sit on his rump and get killed more than the rest of us."

"Why would he be jealous of me?" Shawn asked, surprised.

Riko skeptically glanced up at Shawn as he hopped next to the knight who was forced to move along his path once the other ice-toad had moved out of the way. "You're fairly well-rounded for an enemy you know. Good strength and defense, great resistance to almost all magic."

"Except light/white magic." Shawn grimaced, remembering the piercing brightness that usually blasted a decent portion of his hit points away. Shawn glanced down at the weak little ice-toad moving along with him, "And what about you? Are you jealous."

"Me? Ha! No way. You couldn't pay me to respawn like the two of you have to. I hate getting killed all the time. And free-range movement, you know? All around the floor. It's nice really, talk to all the people I want and... Oh. Sorry." Riko caught the wistful expression on Shawn's face.

"No, no. It's alright." Shawn shook his head, "I don't mind." "Much." He thought to himself. It wasn't that he didn't like Riko talking about it or anything, not at all. Riko was the only thing in the room that ever talked to him, except for the chimera. But Shawn didn't count yelling insults as talking.

"Oh great. Here comes the Hero again. I'm going to the other side of the room so that I don't accidentally run into the Hero. See you after a while!" Riko gave a little froggie wave as he hopped off.

This time, the Hero headed straight for Shawn. Shawn managed to release a sigh as he saw the Hero enter his range before the inner bloodlust took over and induced his body into running directly into another battle...

--

So I personally found the idea of a polite redead/zombie knight amusing. The name Shawn alludes to 'Shawn of the Dead', a supposedly hilarious zombie movie that I've never actually watched. This ended up being more like a story than I had originally planned. At the time, a lot of random conversations were just floating around in my head that I figured I could simply cut back and forth between, like the 'how are your kids' and 'oh no here comes the Hero again' but what you read is just what happened when I sat down to type it up. Also, the setting is in fact the tower from Baten Kaitos, though I don't particularly say that. I don't say it because there aren't any knights in the tower and there aren't really chimeras, there are hellhounds. But those are little details that have no revelance at all. Anywho. Thanks for reading!